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Comments and Suggestions
Article re-organised into several sections. Please use the appropriate section for anything you insert. Do not use this page to report bugs and errors. Rather use the Error Reports page. Requests for Features, Enhancements & Options Feature requests Insert suggestions or requests for new features here. * I would like to be able to specify keywords, and have Sage automatically open corresponding feeds in new background tab. * Syncronizing with online bookmark sites like http://del.icio.us. I want to have a "feeds" tag which I tag all my feeds with. Sage should login to delicious and syncronize with the "feeds" tag and then use that list as my feed list. * Allow collapsed directories to "bold" when new content is detected in any feed located in them ** Yes, this would be great. * Allow Sections of the Sage Window to be expanded or collapsed, as in Safari's RSS reader. * Add Search engine into Sage Window * Display date/time according to ISO8601, e.g. "2005-10-29 14:05" * Too many feature requests, keep it light-weight and not make it too complex * For each feed, update in the background regularly and keep unread items in the list, currently only the items the feed currently propagates are shown in the list. * Move feeds with new items to the top of the list * Grouping facilities would be nice so you could read the feeds by group and not by source ** group by category (Tech, Sports, Science etc...) ** group by date ***Agreed, I'd love this too! * Support for the enclosures feature of RSS 2.0 (for things like podcasting). See Question and Answers section. * May configure feed's printing. i.e. auto-print new feed. Work with Feed-specific auto-refresh feeds. * Ability to wrap feed headlines in bottom-left window so that long feeds are readable and the pane can be made smaller. * Feed-specific auto-refresh feeds and the ability to load from cached data (rather than fetching the document each time the feed is clicked). * Favicon support. ** seconded. * Toolbar notification on new feed discovery and precise within Sage how many new feeds have been identified (for example, between braquets before the name of the feed ?!) * The possibility to have Sage start automatically with Firefox and automatically refresh, so that I wouldn't have to manuallly open and refresh it. * Store the opml file on a remote server, so that I can configure Sage to retrieve from that server instead of local file. This is very useful if you have two or more computers (work, home, ...) and want to synchronize them. ** Seconded! * Better Live Bookmarks integration. Feeds imported from OPML and feeds added with the autodiscovery mechanism in Sage are added as regular bookmarks. On the other hand, feeds added with the Firefox autodiscovery mechanism are added as Live Bookmarks. It makes the process of reading and adding feeds unnecessarily confusing. * Searching feeds: there doesn't seem to be a way to add RSS search feeds to Sage. The RDF defining the defaults looks quite straightforward: DAYPOP UTF-8 It would be handy if there was an 'Add RSS Search Feed' option that took the name and query at least and added them to a user defined list of search options. Being able to aggregate search over several RSS search feeds would be handy too. To simplify things even further, if people take up on OpenSearch then it would be good to autodiscover search feeds, e.g. from something like: * I'd like Sage to hide all feeds that I have marked as read. I have an extremely long list of feeds, and I think it is annoying to scroll to the bottom to see something that has recently updated when the ones at the top have all been read. ** Seconded *** Thirded * I'd like to be able to subscribe to an OpenSearch service in the search box, and display the RSS-format search results in Sage. Spotted here * it would be nice if sage had a few more basic options about the viewability of the rendered feeds in the contents window. For example, if we could set the colour or the font size. i know there's a custom css function, but not everyone knows too much about writing a css file! my feed renders are too small so i have to keep increasing the text size for the render, then decreasing again for the links. * It would be nice, if Sage does not only show the news channel feeds, opened from the sage sidebar, but also all the other feeds from any websites with the user defined CSS stylesheet (to avoid Firefox' ugly default xml view). This feature would be similar to feedview, another extension. * Be able to keep regular Bookmarks in the Sage folder. Perhaps have them displayed in Sage in a different style or with a certain icon to distinguish them from the feeds, but have them visible in Sage right along with the RSS feeds in the same category. When you click on them, it should open the regular page in the browser. I would prefer not to have to keep two groups of bookmarks...one for regular sites and one for feeds. * Add advertisement filtering to the thread title and description. This should be simply an regex which upon matching would reject the thread. Unfortunatelly *advertisements in the RSS are becoming a real problem* (I second this) * Add support for feed autodiscovery on web pages. See RSS Site Index Panel below. * Make the discover feeds panel resizeable. * Add "Group Newspaper" like in FeedDemon * Mark all read/unread for selected Sage folder (context menu) * Add Aggregation of multiple feeds into bottom of side-panel, preferably prefixed with a short desc. of the source channel * You can't resize it so it becomes very small, which would make it possible to follow the links in the newsfeeds in almost full screen, without having to close Sage. Maybe it would be nice if you could hide it temporarily when you're following a link in a feed and make it popup from the side again when you want to read another feed? * Tell how many new posts have been made in each updated feed. Simply saying that there have been new posts by displaying a star on the feed isn't adequate when you're talking about high traffic sites like Wired or Slashdot. * Is there any way to combine feeds, such as in a Livejournal friends page? chrisgriswold AT gmail DOT com. * Seconded - ideally what I want is the ability to view groups of feeds (or all my feeds at once) together sorted chronologically, like the LJ page. Cnet's Newsburst does this in Stream mode, but I don't particularly trust them with things. * Thirded - this was at one point one of the main features of RSS - the ability to remix feeds. Perhaps this could be an option on a folder or something similar? So that if one wants to access the group of feeds, one could do it by using the folder they are in? All news items in the "News" folder, etc. * Use the description part of the bookmark to set a schedule of when to search for a feed update. For example, some feeds reliably only update once a day and are very large (woot.com). If a user selects a feed that isn't to be refreshed, a cached version is displayed. I see two ways of this working. ** User sets a length of time, 1 hour for an example. Sage won't refresh that feed if it has been refreshed in the last hour. ** User sets a time of day and a recurrance. Example is tod=12:15 and recurrance=30 minutes. Sage will only refresh if it hasn't already refreshed since the last 15 or 45 of the hour. * Is there any way of getting an alert when a new post has been issued in a feed? I miss new things otherwise. * The most important feature that I miss in Sage is automatic refresh. Having to hit the refresh button every now and then gets tedious after a while. Automatic refresh, set at a user-specified interval, could of course be implemented along with the schedule feature, described above. ** Seconded - automatic refresh would make Sage almost perfect. ** I agree, too. Automatic refresh should be implemented in one the next releases. Also it would be nice to add a "notify-window" (similar to the update-notification-window), which slides into the screen and show the received headlines. That would be great! ** Yes, automatic refresh and a notify window would (like the one Thunderbird has when new mail arrives) be quite nice. * I subscribe to a lot of feeds, and they are all categorized in subfolders. Most of the time the tree of folders is collapsed - but Sage doesnt give any indication if there are new posts in a feed in a subfolder! It would be nice if the subfolder title would be made bold if there's an updated feed in the subfolder. * Seconded - it would be nice to not have to check all of my folders individually to see which feeds in those folders had fresh content. * seconded - I would like a virtual feed: I have several IT-news feeds. If I organize them in a subfolder, it would be perfect that I could use this folder as a virtual rss feed on it's own, with all entries of it's sub feeds. So when I tell the folder to refresh, it checks all the feeds in it and shows all feeds as one feed with it's entries odrdered chronolgicaly, behaving just like an ordinary feed. * fourthed :) - the very most important usability enhancement for me is the ability to collapse folders and still see which have been updated. I even considered trying to patch it myself, but my XUL skills are ... well, beginner-level. So I couldn't find where the presentation of the sidebar is done. But if someone pointed it out ... * Allow Sage to read podcast xml. Right now, other RSS readers do so, but Sage does not. * Please add support for 'feed:' urls. Example: feed:http://www.arsmathematica.net/feed/ - the 'feed:' is part of the url actually. It is documented at http://www.brindys.com/winrss/feedformat.html and has to be backward-compatible with rss urls. Sage can neither autodiscover such feeds nor parse them if added manually. * When you create your own css file, It would be nice to use it over http://. Now you have to copy file to every machine you like to use. * Any support for podcasts? * Mark all as read for your feed list (like you can for a specific feed). I just imported a 100+ OPML, and having to go through each feed an mark all as read is a pain. I second auto-refresh. * Add support for Growl notifications http://growl.info/ there is the growlnotify terminal plug-in that can make the things easier http://growl.info/documentation/growlnotify.php * Would it be possible to add a preference pane for the settings of Sage in the preferences window ? (in the way of the Tabbrowser preferences extension). * this may be a bug actually, but I would like Sage to remember what tab is the formost when I click on a link, so that if I move to another tab the feed will still open in the first. It is annoying have sage just grab the formost tab, especially when it is doing an update that may take a while, and you move to another tab. * I would like to be able to filter feed items. For example, the feed from softpedia.com contains several different type of programs. Like freeware, shareware etc. This is mentioned in the feed header between parenthesis. I would like to be able to filter on this, so I only get to see freeware or shareware etc. * Refresh the feeds automatically in the background. * Expard the platforms sage supports to include Netscape 8.0? I'm not allowed to use firefox or mozilla, but netscape's allowed. Go figgure. * I would also like to see feeds automatically refreshed in the background. * Ticker-style notification of the latest news headline? OPML Import / Export Requests related to options for OPML import & export. * Allow OPML import by drag'n'drop a link to an OPML file from the browser page. At present one has to use Firefox to save the link to the disk, then afterwards using Sage | Options | Import OPML and browse to the saved file. * Allow OPML upload by FTP with user defined FTP settings. Easily transfer your collection of news feeds to your own website. * LineWrap instead of ... for headings in bottom window Lock SAGE into the window or tab in which it is opened. Tabbed browsing Requests relating to Sage and Firefox tabs go here. * Open all updated feeds in tabs. Would save the manual process of CTRL/Middle clicking on updated feeds to open them in their own tab. ** An alternative would be that you can pre-load the pages of a specific feed to make browsing smoother. (without already opening the tabs so the tabbar stays 'clean') -- maarten 83.134.52.81 20:23, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC) ** See Greasemonkey User Scripts section for a user script that may help this problem. (Added 4 Jul 2005) ** Middle-clicking on more than one RSS feed before it is completely loaded displays the most recently clicked feed and not all the feeds that were selected. I would like for all feeds to be opened with sage with a single middle click (similar to middle clicking a Firefox bookmark folder). The greasemonkey script opens links within sage in a new tab (not exactly what I was hoping for). Currently, middle clicking a folder within sage opens them all up in tabs but it doesn't use the RSS feed with sage's stylesheet. Describing this point more specifically (as well as considering the needs of the original contributor of this point), it will also be nice if options like "Open unread tabs starting from a certain link in the feed". For example TheInquirer usually displays the last 40 news items from their site, of which you might have (say) already read 25 items and just need to read the rest 15 items. * Add button and/or context menu item => "Open all updated feeds in tabs". I have about 100 feeds that I check almost daily. Have to (Middle) Click on each updated feed to view it (often greater than 30 feeds). Would like to have a feature that allowed all updated feeds to be opened into their own tabs so that I can then just read through them. * Make Sage more tabbed-browsing friendly. I don't appreciate how it hijacks my tabs. Also, it could use BOLD text for feeds with new/unread items. Navigation Requests relating to improved navigation. * Allow feed urls to be entered from the sidebar * If a url with an .rdf or .rss extension is typed into the address bar, the page is opened automatically in Sage. Quick keys * Alt-S collides with standard search key in many sites (php.net, mozilla.org). Key combo should be configurable. * Seconded - ALT+* should be avoided as this could clash with any accesskey. Suggest CTRL+something, in line with the existing sidebars. - JonDowland * Seconded - With my german localized version 1.0.4 of Firefox on Win2000 ALT-S doesn't work at all. It even collides with the edit form on this wiki wich uses ALT-S as an accesskey for "Save Page". CTRL-* isn't probably such a good idea, because it would most certainly collide with one of the "built in" quick keys of mozilla (like CTRL-S for "Save As"), with another extension or with quick keys set up by the user on his operating system. I vote for configurable too. * Seconded - ALT+S also collides with Google Toolbar. It should be possible to configure it, maybe to a 3-key combo like ALT+SHIFT+S. * There should be an update feeds shortcut. Having to mouse to and click the little icon negates the speed and convenience of a show/hide keyboard shortcut. Security features Insert anything to do with security here. * Secure RSS : Allow for feeds which require basic authentication -- e.g. automatically logging into the feed for you, avoiding interactive login. * Add security checks - see http://izynews.com/en/safe_rss/ Enhancements Suggestions and requests for enhancements to existing features should go here. * Make it easy to change the default css style. Give new users three - four options. (current wiki styles are a mess - some have download links, other dont have pictures etc) ** I agree. More specifically, I find the default two columns annoying since most feed articles come in different lengths; this makes lots of unnecessary white-space from the left-floated divs. In short, an option to specify the number of columns (1 in my case!) * Fields marked as read should be tagged with a new class in the HTML - that way people can write a style sheet that doesnt display items marked as read. * CACHING. It really irritates me that when I click "Check Feeds", Sage obediently downloads the feeds, and shows me thatthere are new stories. I then click on each feed, only for it to download again! Why? I've JUST downloaded them! The retrieved result should be cached either until the next reload, or until the headers on the document state that it's out of date. *Why does Sage query each feed, one after the other? Can't it query them all together at once, asynchronously? **Seconded. Perhaps Sage could use a couple of threads to check feeds simultaneously instead of checking them in order? *It would be nice to be able to see the 'Author' of the topic with the default CSS stylesheet. This is particularly useful for Op-Eds where one reads articles from a particular author. * Just a tiny issue; could the feed titles themselves remain bold as long as there are unread stories inside, instead of unbolding on click? *Or better yet, be able to mark the feed titles as read or unread, whether they are or aren't, as well as story titles? *seconded! I open feeds all the time and then realize that a post is too long for me to read right now, but how am I to remember that there's something there if the little title isn't bold in that handy sidebar? *'thirded'... some mechanism so that I don't have to click every feed and check the list of posts to see which are unread. Maybe an unread count next to the feed title? * User-defined highlighting for visited and unvisited pages. JoeMalin * Automatically refresh the feeds when opening the Sage sidebar option. * Allow pop-up notifications for user-selected updated feeds like the pop-ups for Forecast Fox - it would also be cool if we could run Sage and not have it look/feel just like Firefox - ie it could be detached. * What might be helpful as well would be a way to render the contents on-demand from a feed rather than having to run to the Sage menu and select that I want the contents rendered or not. That would be very helpful so I can render the feeds I want to render without having all feeds rendered all the time. * Make the context menu options "Open in New Window," and "Open in New Tab" in the Feed List window render the feed items in the appropriate container. The use case for this is where you turn off the "Render feeds in content area" but do want occasionally to see the rendered feed. * Seconded: Scenario: Start firefox---> Open sage sidebar to see feeds (which update one at a time...slow)---->feeds which have new stuff highlighted--->in meantime also checking mail. At present you can only open a new tab and allow sage to render it in the new tab (which sage has to once again download...why?). Why can't I open a new tab and have sage render there while I go back to my mail tab and work with mail. By the way openinh a new window also leads to sage rendering into whichever firefox window is being used once its done. * Automatic refresh of feeds on open, but user definable the minimum time between automatic refreshes (slashdot and others ban you if you refresh too often). * Reduce the visual clutter in the sidebar. Many of the lines of interface could be merged and other things should have options to turn them off (e.g. current feed title/link). * Read stories stay read after you go to another feed and come back. be a bug * Buttons for the rendered page for the mark as read/unread, mark all as read/unread. * Change color of or allow modification of font for bookmark separators. Text renders in almost invisible gray on Mac G5. * Better integration with XBEL bookmark format: when syncronising bookmarks, SAGE "forgets" what is the folder where the feeds are stored. *Enable user to change feed titles ** Seconded! - Some feed suppliers don't give useful titles to their feeds, and when they have multiple feeds with the same name, it makes them useless. *cough* SitePoint.com *cough* :rolleyes: ** I used to rename feed titles to more meaningful names, but when I use sage it changes feed title back to provider specific - only bad thingy in sage :) * Add "direct input" similar to dynamic websites, e.g. chrome://sage/content/search/viewfeed.xul?url=http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac.rss, so that this can become a bookmark and a keyword can be used to load the feed using the default or custom CSS file. Icons * Add toolbar icon on install * The Sage tab should use a favicon to make it easier to find. * Please add favicon support for news items. Thanks! * Small icons for refresh and search. * Allow the removal of the Technorati icon. Options Comments and suggestions for Sage options should be inserted here. * Request - include an About option at the foot of the Options menu. * Add an option to automatically check feeds every x minutes. * An option to display posts as a single column instead of two adjacent columns would be great. * An option for the two column headline list go like this: stories 1-5 down the left column, 6-10 down the right column - i.e. like newspaper stories and phone books. ** Second. A lot of space is wasted between stories. * Add an option to remove the item numbers (1. , 2. , ...) * I've switched to Lektora because it has these two functions, although I prefer Sage in every other respect. ** optionally show only feeds with unread items. ** optionally mark all items read automatically. * Display addition changes to a feed in green and subtraction changes (see http://www.nws.noaa.gov/alerts/il.rss and netflix queue -- it happens!) in red, and black be "content changed". A couple things...RobertGuico ** This should apply to the list of feeds in addition to the list of items in each feed. ** Maybe have options regarding deleted items. Have feed-specific options that show what items were deleted, mark those red, and have them be crossed out in the list? There's a lot of options here... ** Feeds with items both added and deleted could be black or blue. * Option to search feeds. RegExp search, discovery, and inline changes to feed titles for some feeds (not to kill you or anything ;-) RobertGuico * Option to allow "Open In New Tab" to be set as default action * User option to limit the maximum number of items in a newsfeed. Some newsfeeds are too prodigious, they have far too many. * Instead of setting an alternative css file one should be able to supply a folder or a zipped file where all three files("sage.css", "template-html.txt" and "template-item.txt") are exchanged for sage. If one of them is missing in this folder/zip file, the default file in sage.jar is used. This would allow much more possibilities regarding style and even additional functionality via JavaScript. * A customizable purge (delete) age for already read feeds * A customizable refresh feed rate (e.g. every n mins, hrs) Note: browser.bookmarks.livemark_refresh_seconds exists (for Live Bookmarks only). * User option to move index frame to right of screen. Settings Comments and suggestions for the settings menu under Sage options should be inserted here. * Include a checkbox for Use custom feed template, so the look of the feed renderings can be customized easily. * Please explain the two Feed discovery modes : [ Exhaustive | Conservative ] * In Feed rendering, separate "Allow Images" from "Allow HTML". The problem being in order to rid myself of intrusive images I lose hyperlinks and HTML formating. This would be even better if it was a property of each feed so I could block images only in the worst offenders. * Limit amount of messages shown * Additional sort order: reverse of original * When rendering feeds in the content area, have a setting to place the focus in the content area when a feed title is clicked. Currently, I click on the feed title in the sidebar and start reading the feed in the content area. When I try to scroll down to see more items, the feed title list in the sidebar scrolls instead of the feed items in the content area. Using Sage with Forum feeds Issues pertaining especially to Forum feeds: Forum Title Modification Request In forum feeds, the topic title is taken from: 'Forum Title' :: 'Topic Title' Often the Forum Title is long enough that it dominates the Sage sidebar listing such that the Topic Title isn't even displayed. The suggestion is to have an option to axe the repetitive Forum Title, perhaps by matching with each 'Forum Title' Forum Listing Compression * Listing all unread posts in one forum topic in the Sage sidebar bottom panel, results in wasted time looking through the listings. That's because the earliest unread post allows one to browse the remaining, newer posts directly. To subsequently click on a Sage sidebar newer post link in that topic is wasted effort. So as to avoid such rebrowsing, one is forced to more closely examine each unread link posted in the sidebar to verify that it isn't just a newer post in the same topic. * The suggestion is to list only the earliest unique unread 'Topic Title'. Perhaps this needs to be an option to deal with non-forum newsfeeds. * Add an option to hide the posts that have been read in the current session. * Add an option for feeds to be cached, then periodically updated at a set interval, and not updated every time the feed is clicked on. * Fix the tooltip so that it displays the full title/wraps the title if it is long Comments * It would be more useful to get only titles on the left panel if clicking once, and get the details on the main one only if clicking twice on the RSS feed. Then, clicking on an icon should allowed to render the detail of a title below it, still on the left panel. So you can check RSS feeds while you read an other page. * One big drawback to Sage is that when you uninstall it and then install a new version, you lose all your subscribed feeds. SOLUTION First export all your feeds using Sage Options | OPML Export. Afterwards import your OPML file using Sage Options | OPML Import. Questions (& Answers) * Could Sage be setup to display the main summary window on the tab which is currently shown when the link is clicked (instead of the tab which is currently selected once the feed has been updated)? * Should not automatically reset the feed title in the feed list - every time i edit the title, and subsequently use Sage to read the feed the feed title gets reset. A BUG Go to "Options->Settings" and uncheck "Automatically update feed titles" * I recently added Sage as an Extension to Firefox, but I don't see any way to add and RSS feeds. I tried clicking on XML buttons on various website with feeds but that did not help, just got a page filled with XML. I could not even add the Sage feed. Does anyone have a workaround to add feeds to Sage or can anyone recommend another RSS reader? Thanks, CMA. ANSWER Please visit the Getting Started page and read the externally linked article near the top of the page. * Why does the pop-up not render the whole title ? And I think it is not suite to allow the RSS to modifie the name of it. It should only modifie the feeds. Anyway, this extension is usefull and far better than others. Bravo. * ASK simple question - I look at CVS version(was this what you meant?) and saw some cool adds (like images display and enclosure). I think they should be included in next version. * How can I set up a page that displays a set number of items from each feed registered with Sage? Can Sage do this automatically? * Does SAGE support the enclosures feature of RSS 2.0 (for things like podcasting)? * Is it possible to have sage list all of my feeds onto one html page instead of having to open a different page for each feed? (as I use it to track new posts on different forums) * When I click on a Feed title I don't want to see the newsitems in a new page, I only want to see the items in the section under the titles. I hate it when the webpage I visited dissappears and the newsitem's css is shown. ANSWER In Sage's settings un-check 'Render feeds in contents area' checkbox. * What attribute(s) does Sage use to detect that an RSS item has been updated? I've tried updating the item's guid, pubDate, and link, each separately and all together. Regardless, Sage doesn't highlight the item as new. How can I force Sage to detect that an item has been updated? * Firefox 1.5 beta compatibility would be nice. It would be nice to see new Sage release at the same time (or within a day or two) of all future Firefox releases (e.g. after you release a 1.5b1 compatibile version -any moment now....- begin work on a 1.5b2 compatible version).... * How does one get rid of the dotted selection border? Image:http://img271.imageshack.us/img271/3454/sage3ty.jpg ANSWER That's a Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 issue. They've fixed that with the latest official release (Firefox 1.5 RC1). RSS Site Index Panel * Someone asked about adding autodiscovery for RSS feeds on a site. * This can already be done providing you have GreaseMonkey installed. See RSS Site Index Panel. Other applications Extending Sage to other applications than Firefox? * Make Sage work in Mozilla suite. * Support Thunderbird (0.7)